Is There Really A Summer Slump In B2B Marketing?, How We Are Managing Multiple Offers Right Now, What Are We Doing To Build A Brand

0:01I think, look, I can just say on sales numbers for us, lead count has picked up again, And we're closing a lot more predictably. And so that's been good for us. Yeah, we see a slump during the next few months. Summer is typically slow for us in marketing. Which is good to talk about because you said, is there really a summer slump in B2B marketing? Because I actually talked to my team about this too. So what's your take on it? And then I'll give you my thoughts. We usually don't see a slowdown too much in traffic or leads or self-service revenue. We do usually see a slowdown in enterprise contracts during the summer, consistently every year.

0:34How about when you go back to your software days with, let's say, was Kissmetrics mature enough for you to have good data there on, was it a summer slowdown or not? There was not a summer slowdown, but the price points were much lower and we usually non-enterprise. So self-service, non-enterprise, we typically saw or self-service, non-enterprise. We typically didn't see much of an impact during the summer months. But for enterprise, we typically do see more of a slowdown because a lot of people are taking vacations with kids. Yeah. My guess. So I think we can both agree that agency side, there's almost always a slowdown when it comes to summertime.

1:12I think software side, we're actually seeing a pickup right now. We're just going into summer. But I think software side, we'll see it be more consistent, which is good. That allows us to maybe focus more on building out the software side during this summer slowdown with agencies. Yeah, but I also think you see the software picking up for a different reason. It's new. You're not at scale yet. You're growing. It's a solution that people need. There's not a ton of good alternatives. and when you look at your base, you've grown really well, but you're still starting from a smaller base. So you shouldn't see any slump or slowdown for a while.

1:46Well, when I say that, the reason is in the last week for Carrot, which is our LinkedIn account-based marketing product, I think we closed three or four in the last week, right? Which wasn't like that before. Like all these people are coming out of nowhere. It's like, hey, we're ready, we're ready, right? And they're just like paying the thing, right? We're just, we're ready to go. On the ClickFlow side, which is our SEO software, There's a lot of good mid-market enterprises in there. And I wouldn't say that's a novel solution. I would say there's some more mature solutions out there. But I would say it's consistent.

2:12The lead flow is consistent on those sides. And it doesn't feel like, if anything, it feels like it's picking up there. Whereas on the agency side, you see the summer slump coming. What's the price points? So on the carrot side of things, if for a pilot, it's three grand, four grand for 45 days. Okay. And then it's basically two or three grand a month. and then, or 5 % of ad spend, whichever is higher. That's the first one. Okay. And then on the ClickFlow side, we're just rolling that into services. So it's like, we'll give you 25 ,000 words for free. And then we just try to roll them into services, which is agency services.

2:46Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is a good idea. During the Kissmetrics days, we usually didn't see a slowdown for things like sub 10 grand, 20 grand. We typically saw a slowdown in buying cycles when it was things like 100 grand, 200 grand. No, annual. Annual. So, yeah. Yeah. This is like we're talking. When they need more of a sign off. Yeah. Yeah. 30, 40, 50 grand. So, you know, you still need a little something sometimes depending on the company size, but not always. I don't. Yeah. I don't have too much data on that for software 30, 40, 50, because at Kiss, we were, we had contracts that were even six figures, but majority of them were sub 20.

3:26Yeah. And I would say majority were actually sub 10. So I just didn't have good data points on price points like 50, 60. But I do know from 100 plus, because with Kiss, we had a lot of lower and then some crazy high, like 100 plus. Yeah. Who sold those? We had a sales team. There was a guy named Ben Sardella who ran all the sales for us. Yeah, I remember that. And what we always found was summer slowdown with the higher price points, not because we weren't getting leads or traffic. It was just required more of a sign off. And a lot of those people that we're trying to get sign offs for were taking summer vacations.

3:59Yep, yep. By the way, I mean, because we're kind of talking about this, let's talk about how we're managing multiple offers right now. Because I mentioned earlier, the click flow of the offers, we'll give you 25 ,000 words for free, production-grade content. Carrot is basically, okay, we'll help you create personalized LinkedIn ABM ads. And you have different offers too. And so how are we managing different offers right now? That is the prompt. So the way we manage different offers is we have different teams for different offers. and then we have people placed within each of those teams that work cross-organizationally.

4:33I'm probably using the wrong term, but where they work in all divisions and their goal is to integrate and make sure people are cross-selling and doing what's best for the company and not just doing what's best for a division. We also have incentives aligned for the different divisions to focus on what's best for the organization, not what's best for their own individual unit. I'll give you a great example of this. We have answer the public. We collect leads from Answer the Public, right? We have it in there where if Answer the Public helps collect more leads, but it hurts their revenue, you can do cross-company charges and give them some of the marketing budget or budgets from some of the other organizations where it helps them to offset some of the hurt that Answer the Public is taking by helping some of the other organizations.

5:20And then on our end, we just look at the math formula and what is best for the overall organization. and then we do that. Yeah, I have nothing to add there. That's basically, you guys do that at a higher level than we do. So we do a couple of things there. But the main thing is just make, I think the main thing I want to cover from that one is just we have alignment. We don't want silos where it's like, oh, I'm just on this one. I'm just on this. It doesn't work out. No, we need you guys to understand everything across the board because that's how we're all going to do better. Because you build in more lock-in, you build in more retention.

5:47And we've had people who are supposed to operate on, I think, company-wide, even when the incentives are aligned that way, but they only care about their department. And when we had that, those people don't last long. It's about how do we help the team, not how do I make more money individually. Or for my department. Because if the person does really well for the organization, the organization will figure out a way to compensate them. So you have one here on what are we doing to build brand or how valuable are in-person events for enterprise marketing? Yeah, so let's talk about what are we doing to build brand.

6:20I just went to an in-person event and there was a lot of publicly traded organizations and they're all talking about if we don't get the clicks to our website as much because things are changing. If you're doing shopping, a lot of it's coming to social commerce and in-app purchasing, TikTok shops, Shopify, you can buy in-app now. I mean, not Shopify, Instagram, right? I don't know about Shopify. I don't know if they even have an app, but Instagram, TikTok, you can just buy natively within their own applications. You have AI overviews, Google AI mode, chat GPT. Yes, you can get clicks, but you're not getting as many clicks.

6:59And there was an interesting thing that we saw in the room. So most of the organizations that were there, almost actually all of them, I'm pretty sure all of them, they're publicly traded or owned by a publicly traded organization. And or partly owned by a publicly traded organization. And almost all of them had data and analytics divisions. and most people saw interesting consensus conversion rates from what and you're talking about maybe 20 30 companies in the room multiple people from each company most organizations saw actually a higher conversion rate from chat gbt than most sources they're like we don't get that much traffic but we're getting really high conversions from the traffic we can track And what was interesting here is you're probably not getting as high conversion as you think from ChatGPT.

7:49You're only able to assign the conversion to the clicks that you're getting. But how many other people are seeing the brand and learning about it and not clicking over versus Google or some of the other platforms that are clicking over to learn? So I believe the conversion rate is actually really lower, but the total number of people that learn about the brand is much higher than they're able to track. And if you look at what you and I are doing, we are still focusing on building content heavily and unique content that is on new topics that most people aren't talking about because it increases our chances that the AI platforms are going to continually mention us.

8:30And as they mentioned us, we look at that as a huge way to build a brand and a way to stay relevant and drive revenue. Yeah. And as you're saying that, by the way, so us doing this podcast, we do try to stay. We do talk a lot about marketing news, but I think about my YouTube channel. The videos I've been making recently are a lot tied to latest trends around business marketing or AI. And guess who's going to pick that up in AI mode? Well, Google owns YouTube. Yeah. So like we're going to show up. Right. And so we're playing the long, I think if I'm gonna answer this question directly, what are we doing to build brand?

9:01There's a lot of video that comes into play and we're really building for the long-term and we're trying to compound for the long-term with the understanding that the game is much different than it was 15 years ago where we could just crank out blog posts. You actually have to spend time Noah setting this up, you coming downstairs, me driving here, right? Five minutes away to do this, but sit in person and actually have to bring our A game and actually have to experiment because that's authentic. Yes. And so it's easier to build a brand if you're being authentic. Yeah. And I think if, and what really opened the eyes for me is when we were at the YPO Marketing Summit that you threw in Miami, we gave a talk.

9:38Noah was there. Noah tends to record all our podcasts. But at that time, he couldn't record our podcast because he was recording the talks at the YPO Marketing Summit. So we were in our room or your room and you pulled up some sort of camera on a stick. I don't know what it was called. It's a DJI Osmo. And so Noah gave me his extra one and I had what? I thought we only had one running. No, we had two running. Oh, we had two running. Yeah, we had two, yeah. And then I think we just had DJI Marks or something like that, right? Yeah, yeah. And it wasn't as good quality as this because we didn't have Noah doing the lighting and all that kind of stuff.

10:13We know you couldn't be at two places at once. So we understand. And that episode or that string of episodes because we recorded straight for like an hour and 20 hour, 30 minutes. We had no scripts. You and I just free flowed for literally almost an hour and a half. And we had some of our best feedback and view counts on those episodes. And it was purely because we were just being authentic and transparent. And I think after that, you and I started being like, oh, let's just be more open and transparent. It's not like we were trying to hide anything. It was just more so let's just be off the cuff and real.

10:45Yeah. Because the reality is, by the way, if you're doing interesting things, you should just talk about those things. Like it's easier to just talk about stories about things that you're doing already versus trying to react in a news cycle. Yes, we talked about Elon today, but that's a bigger topic. But it's, and that's what makes you authentic too because you're out there, you're trying things. And so that's what, and that podcast, by the way, the comments we got were, it feels like two friends having a conversation. And then another comment was, this is the type of content we follow you guys for.

11:10And we're like, oh, okay, fine. We should do more of that. And by the way, sometimes it's not like we need a lot of views or whatever. You just read like one or two comments and it's like the qualitative feedback sometimes matters more than the quantitative feedback. Yeah, yeah. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

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13:15Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. So, but there's one thing I sent you and I ran a test here. This is kind of, maybe you call me crude for running this test after my mom passing, but I basically shared this poem with a lot of people. Okay, I shared it with you. Yeah, it was not a criticism. It was sweet. I thought it was a beautiful poem. So I shared this poem with a lot of people.

13:48I shared it with like my mom's best friend the other day when I saw her and she started crying, right? And a lot of people were crying. I mean, I cried a lot when I read this poem, right? Now, the crazy thing about this poem is that it's a note that my mom wrote to me, right? Now, here's the crazy thing. I had my mom, she wrote me this note in Chinese. It was a three-page note. I can't read that stuff. So I went to chat, QPJ, I translated it. It did a good translation in English. It was pretty good. And then it asked me a question at the end. It was like, do you want to make this poetic? And I was like, sure.

14:17So I made it poetic and it was levels above the original, the English translation. It was not even close. Cause then I had my, my mom's best friend the other day, she was reading. I was like, I need you to read the original. So I started the original, right? She's like, yeah, the poem crushes the original. Not to say my mom wrote anything bad. It was pretty good. It just took the emotional aspects and emphasized them. it was taking the true meaning from what your mom was trying to write and write it in a way of someone who's a talented writer. Yeah, it made it a really talented writer. Now, my mom, what she wrote, like the essence is still there, I think, to your point, right?

14:52But I'm just like, wow, this is the first time where I've seen something AI generated make multiple humans, like a lot of humans cry. Obviously, I'm going to cry from it, but I'm just like, yeah, you know, and this is the worst they'll ever be. It's just going to get better over time. So the poem was so good that I'm having a version framed for in front of my, And not having a version frame for my bedroom. But it's like, I think there's one thing that I want to pass to everyone here is the one thing I have no regret on here. And this is not necessarily an Eric Saab story podcast, but I read on Reddit a long time ago.

15:23It's like, what's the biggest regret you have before your parents going in? Everyone was like not recording more content. So that DJI Osmo that we recorded in Miami, I made so much vlog content with her before she passed. And I basically interviewed her like a podcast, right? Got her stories and then had her write this in the stories book you can buy from Amazon called Tell Me Your Story, Mom, or Tell Me Your Story, Dad. And then that's where I got all those things, right? And so all that to say is like, a lot of people hit me up afterwards, like, we're going to do that. And if your parents are still around, do that too.

15:52And maybe you too can have an AI generated poem that makes humans cry. Yeah. And before we go, the one thing that I learned from your experience that really changed my life and it was touching is when you're going through this, you started doing things with your parents that you normally wouldn't because I've known you for a long time. You were single track minded and work was your priority and work came first for everything. I saw you do things like take your mom to some place in Pacific Palos Verdes or something like that, right? Ranchos Palos Verdes, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And spend time. I saw you do the books.

16:31I saw you go over to where they live and spend way more time and not put business first. And when you told me about the book and you can't get back time and filming, it made me realize because if I look at my life, yes, I travel more and I don't have a choice because the economy is bad, but I would make decisions like, if you look at me in a home, I've switched homes roughly once every year and a half and I optimize for what makes me the most money and what's best for my business versus what's best for my family. And when you point to some of those things out, like going through your experience, you're like, is it worth making a little bit extra more money?

17:10And like, for me, not having a yard for my kids to go and run in or something like that, it starts making you think, what is the extra money really worth? Because when you pass away, or you're about to pass away, are you going to remember the money you made? Or are you going to remember the moment? Yeah, you're not going to take any of it. So it's like, all right, you know, there's a point where it's like, it's just not worth it. Yeah. So let me, I think, there's one thing that sticks out to me here. So it's the line that comes to mind is there's no greater poverty than being rich in things and poor in relationships.

17:41And so one of the things my mom wrote in that book, the question was, what is the accomplishment that you're most proud of? And it says, my friends and my family. And I'm like, yeah, that's all that matters. And so I think that is one thing that she helped reinforce there. Like, what else are we working so hard for at the end of the day? Right. And then the final point here is like, you know, the time that we get to spend with them. It's like that that is worth way more than it's worth. It's weight in gold. Like what do you get more of working for another hour or two? And I would say that if you watch this or you listen to this podcast, we talk about creating content.

18:14We talk about software. We talk about creating business or hiring amazing people. You're looking to build all this leverage. But then like, do you really need to crank that hard as hard as we like? We used to crank pretty hard, right? Yeah. As we get a little older, maybe not as much anymore. So that's right. Like I was on a plane. I watched a movie. I'm like, you know. You usually watch movies. I usually work while I watch movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I actually watch the movie without working. That's rare. That's rare. Yeah, yeah. A full movie. A full movie. Wow. I haven't done that for a while.

18:42Yeah. Maybe I'll do that next time. It was like an hour, 40 minutes or something like that. I was like, oh, I watched the movie without working. It was like something called like Novocaine or something like that. I don't know. He's nodding. I don't know what it is. You know, Novocaine is actually a person who doesn't feel pain and tries to burn. Yeah, rescue a girl. I think it's called Novocaine. It was a bank teller, a bank manager, or whatever, but I just relaxed for a minute. It was kind of nice. So enjoy your lives, guys. That's what it is. Take it one day at a time, and it's all about friends and family.

19:11That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.